Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [3]
The extended period of writing is reflected in shifting styles. Part One, in its portraiture of a typical day in the life of Oblomov, is in the manner of what Russians call ‘the natural school’ – a first flower of realism. The comic zaniness in the relation of master and servant owes much to Gogol, the towering figure of the time. Isolated in his cramped room, the outside world blocked out by dusty windows, endlessly squabbling with his manservant Zakhar – the two seem married to each other – Oblomov fears his life may have ended before it started. ‘Why am I like this?’ is the question that sets the novel in motion. In the famous chapter entitled ‘Oblomov’s Dream’ his dreaming mind returns in nostalgia to the lost paradise of childhood, a time when the habits of ordinary life could be fully satisfying. Kitchen, barnyard and meadow are apprehended with poetic warmth; domesticity is granted mythic significance. In his ‘Dream’ Oblomov also sets out to discover the roots of his illness. At a dead end, his recourse is to self-knowledge. As in psychoanalytic theory, childhood gives us the objects of our desire and the source of our disease.
Upon awakening he makes a desperate attempt to join the world. By 1857, when the story of Oblomov’s love for Olga was written, the grotesqueries of the natural school were long out of fashion. The manner of the summer romance is delicate, poetical in the manner of Turgenev, the leading novelist of the late fifties. Oblomov has escaped his shabby seclusion and entered a world of aristocratic refinement. The figure of Olga often melts into lyrical images: a sprig of lilac, radiant light, the aria Casta diva. She promises grace.
Readers have found Stolz unconvincing but his friendship with Oblomov is important. They have been close since childhood. Each represents, we are told, half of life. The half-German Stolz (the name means ‘pride’) is all work, discipline, ambition (the Peter Aduyev of this novel). Oblomov, for all his sorrows, is blessed with the passive virtues: delicacy, imagination, tenderness. ‘Oblomov’ comes from the Russian word that means ‘fragment’, and they are both fragmented men, each looking longingly to the other for what he lacks. For all the mocking of romanticism, Goncharov, like other ‘men of the forties’, held on to its dream of human wholeness. ‘Give me man’, he has Oblomov cry out.
In the last section the loving rendering of everyday life and the dream-like atmosphere of ‘Oblomov’s Dream’ return, as we enter the homely domain of Agafya Matveyevna. Among the symmetrical pairings of Goncharov’s fiction – Peter and Alexander Aduyev, Stolz and Oblomov – are Olga and Agafya, the aristocratic beauty and the nurturing woman from the lower classes.
The novel is acutely conscious of time. In his lonely bachelor apartment Oblomov tries to shut out the common sense of time moving in a straight line, its destination – death. In his ‘Dream’ he evokes a mythical time of eternal returns, where the seasons come and go, men sow and reap, and nothing ever changes. The summer romance seeks to escape the anxiety of change by another kind of permanence – a frozen lyrical moment, a song that never dies. The concluding pages accept the inevitability of death but see life, on the analogy of geological rhythms, as maintaining a perpetual balance. In one place mountains crumble; elsewhere the sea piles up new land.
Goncharov started The Precipice in 1849, when he was still in the early stages of Oblomov. The writing dragged on for twenty years. He rushed to Marienbad periodically, but the inspiration of the glorious summer of ’57 would not return. He was stuck. He